Mathematical modeling of oscillations in a Lotka reaction on a catalyst surface (Q1929288)

This article presents a study of self-exciting reaction rate oscillations in heterogeneous catalytic systems. This is a quite common phenomenon that is observed in many open nonlinear systems. First, papers about this phenomenon are dated 1828 but the most known examples are the cases of the Belousov-Zhabotinskii reaction and Lotka predator-prey model. Self-exciting oscillations are usually described by systems of ordinary differential equations (ODE) where closed trajectories in the system phase space are images of periodic solutions. The authors consider a two-component heterogeneous-catalytic reaction on the surface of a square-lattice catalyst. They relate this reaction to the Lotka model. The reaction kinetic scheme is used for the construction of a hierarchical system of mathematical models. The top level model is obtained by the mean field approximation with infinite diffusion rate. To obtain the presented results, the authors propose two ODE systems with pair probabilities, which allow for the possibility of a bounded diffusion rate for one of the reaction components. These systems exhibit self-exciting oscillations. In successive sections (esp. Section 2), a parametric analysis of the models is conducted, and self-exciting oscillation regions are determined in the parameter space. In Section 3, solutions of the considered systems are compared with the dynamics of the microscopic stochastic models. This allowed to find the conditions for the appearance of macro-level oscillations.